Symantec: Religion sites, not porn, likely to infected with malware

Just a little tidbit of security news today – other than the proposed super warrants and strict data retention laws. Security firm Symantec claims that a religious website is more likely to be infected by malware, as opposed to pornographic websites. Weird, huh?

“Religious and ideological sites were found to have triple the average number of threats per infected site than adult/pornographic sites,” it noted in its report. While it hasn’t broken down sites that were deemed to talk about ideology or religion, it has showed that the top 5 most infected websites were:

1. Blogs and web communications – 19.8% of total infected sites
2. Personal hosted websites – 15.6%
3. Business and Economy – 10.0%
4. Shopping – 7.7%
5. Education and Reference – 6.9%

Pornographic websites only contributed 2.4% of infected websites, and ranked tenth out of the list. But why? Well, according to Symantec, it’s their interest to keep their site secure.

“We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free – it’s not good for repeat business,” it wrote.